


Personae

by apiphile



Category: Withnail & I (1986)
Genre: Backstory, Blackmail, Boarding School, M/M, Prequel, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:18:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prequel to "Dramatis"; Withnail is expelled and tries to bribe his way into Drama School.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personae

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emeriin](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=emeriin).



The rain had no business falling so vehemently in June, but fall it did, rattling on the roof of the front porch at Harrow. It drummed a steady, monotonous beat that merged perfectly with the steady, monotonous drone of Sheridan's former schoolmaster in his ear. The words "Disappointed", "Disgusting" and "fees" came up rather more often than anything else. Sheridan paid him little mind – the man was only a schoolteacher, after all.

Sheridan was just turned sixteen, bony, gangling, and possessed of all the ailments boarding school regularly bestows upon its pupils: borderline trench foot, constipation, headlice, and spots, in varying quantities. Part of the reason Sheridan was ignoring his former teacher was that he had just been expelled, and he didn't bloody well see why he ought to listen to the officious prick anymore, and part of the reason was that, as an attempt to "get through" to him, the man was addressing Sheridan by his Christian name.

It was a name that he loathed with a passion most boys reserved for history exams, cold showers, and trig. His parents might have named him William, or George, or Adrian, or even just fucking _John_, but they had apparently expended their short stock of sanity on the two sons they'd _planned_ for, and so the unexpected third – later, sickly, and by all accounts a fractious and unattractive baby – laboured under the name "Sheridan Donald". What a good wheeze.

Harrow was not entirely sorry to see the back of him. From the start, Sheridan Withnail had been an indifferent student prone to blaming others for his academic short-comings (of which he had many). He was a noisy, incorrigible show-off, a grotesque coward, a lazy and uncoordinated sportsman and, as he grew older, a half-hearted but noteable bully. He was compared unfavourably to his brothers and to his father, all of whom had bestowed relative greatness by proxy on the school through their own achievements. Sheridan, sitting sullenly on his trunk waiting for either his parents or the station to send a car, seemed unlikely to follow in their footsteps.

"You could have gone on to Bailiol – " his schoolmaster lamented. Sheridan ignored him. His _father_ was big on Oxford, said Cambridge was the refuge of spies, sodomites, and socialists, which sounded a deal better to Sheridan.

There was a great screeching of tires and an insistent honk of horn, and a rather beautiful dove grey Bentley pulled up too fast by the porch. The schoolmaster's disapproving sniff was swallowed up by the purr of the engine. Sheridan started forwards as the driver's window slowly jerked down to reveal a porcine face topped with a ludicrous haircut.

"Ah, er, Sheridan. Be a good lad and load up in the back there."

Uncle Monty. Montague Withnail. He occupied much the same role in the preceding generation as Sheridan did in his, although Sheridan had no intention of ever becoming so bloated and unsightly. Uncle Monty was plump and silly and utterly eccentric – Sheridan's father rarely had a good word to say about his money-wasting youngest brother and _this_ was who he'd sent to collect him? Sheridan was as intrigued as he was insulted.

"Hallo, Uncle Monty." He glanced at his teacher. "_You_ can go now."

The wizened old bastard didn't budge an inch.

"I thought I was supposed to be getting the train?" he added as a black-clad and spooky-looking porter materialised to heft his trunk into the back of the Bentley.

"Oh you were, you were," Uncle Monty said, unlocking the passenger door from within. "But, alas, your father suspected you would _flit orf_ if left to your own devices."

The thought had never occurred to Sheridan. He rather wished that it had, now. It was thoroughly dreadful to be suspected of a crime one hadn't even contemplated committing – it felt like such a wasted opportunity.

"They didn't come to _get_ me, though," Sheridan pointed out, hopping onto the seat with all the grace and poise of a drunk rocking-horse.

"Your parents," Uncle Monty said, putting his hand on the back of Sheridan's seat to reverse the vehicle. His hands were pudgy and manicured, although for once he wasn't wearing driving gloves. "Your parents, my boy, are quite angry with you. As they are, as they should be."

"Oh _tosh_," Sheridan snorted. "Do you even _know_ what I got tossed out for?" The tires of the Bentley screeched and slipped on the wet ground as the car turned.

"Really, there's not need to talk like that," Uncle Monty admonished, and Sheridan narrowed his eyes. Large, watery blue, like a startled china doll, they were his best feature; as he resembled a sarcastic house-spider with bad skin most of the time this was no great feat for said eyes.

"I was expelled," Sheridan said slowly, rolling the sentence around his mouth like a humbug as the Bentley sped away from the school and away from London, back towards the mausoleum his family called their _seat_, "because the Reverend Foreshaw caught me sucking Young's cock in chapel." He made sure to emphasise every hard K, every slimy sibilant, and it had the intended result.

Uncle Monty stalled the car on the verge and sat for a very long moment with his hands clamped to the steering wheel, breathing hard and staring at the road ahead while Sheridan mustered his mental forces for whatever response he was about to get. After a long silence, Uncle Monty said in a light and slightly constricted voice, "We have a terribly long drive back to Gloamings, boy. Perhaps we should repair to the tea rooms and you can tell me all about this – " he waved his hand dismissively, " – little _incident_ over some cake, mm?"

Sheridan smirked. "_Withnail's smirk_," staff-room opinion ran, "_or rather his inability to smile like a human being just makes his unabashed tomfoolery all the more appalling_." He folded his hands modestly in his lap and said, "I would like that very much, Uncle."

* * *

 

Around a sticky mouthful of Victoria sponge Sheridan offered another smirk and crossed his legs at the ankle. Several elderly women gave him the kind of looks that they might otherwise have reserved for a gentleman of a certain age speaking German, and Sheridan considered surreptitiously flicking the Vs at them. Miserable old bitches.

"Have you given _some_ thought to what you must do with yourself now?" Uncle Monty asked, teacup held primly in one hand, his fat pinky extended like a radio aerial. They had skimmed over the topic of Young and Young's cock and Sheridan's interactions with it rather more circumspectly than Sheridan had been intending to.

"The stage, perhaps," he said without really thinking. He had given precisely no thought to what happened now beyond the tedious hectoring his mother and father no doubt intended to dog him with, but he vaguely remembered that Uncle Monty had some sort of theatrical agent and if one wanted to find sodomites and socialists and other persons his father deemed undesirable sorts anywhere in the country the acting profession was surely the place to start. Besides, it would irk his father beautifully.

Uncle Monty's face lit up like Blackpool Pleasure Beach. "Ah, the the_a_tre," he said happily, setting his teacup down, "a wonderful pursuit. I was much the same at your age – went to drama school, got into all the right – " he hmm and hrmed to himself for a few minutes while Sheridan bolted his second slice of cake as though he hadn't already had an enormous and starchy breakfast.

The old ladies glared at him. Sheridan wiped icing sugar off his lips with the back of his hand, ignoring the neat little napkins on the table, and glared back.

"Your father …" Uncle Monty ruminated, "your father won't pay for you to go to drama school, you know."

"I know," Sheridan looked at the table sadly and poked his third slice of cake with a very despondent expression. "He loathes theatre."

"Too true, too true," Uncle Monty looked into the middle distance, his mouth twitching thoughtfully.

Sheridan heaved a great sigh and pushed his cake away as though he had lost his appetite, and said in the gloomy tones of a man heading toward the gallows, "I s'pose I shall just take some ghastly City job and marry some horror called Petunia or Gertrude."

As he had expected, Uncle Monty gave him an aghast look and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, murmuring, "simply dreadful" like a catechism.

"If only there were some way …" Sheridan said pointedly, toying with his cake. It was beginning to disintegrate from the stress of being used as a prop.

"My dear nephew," Uncle Monty said in what he probably believed was a fine and noble voice to go with the fine and noble gesture he was about to make, "I'm sure we can come to _some_ arrangement."

* * *

 

The lay-by was justly deserted – there was another a mile or so back with excellent views over the rolling countryside, and one a mile or two ahead which featured a picturesque café serving sticky buns, so one wondered why _this_ one existed at all – but for a dove-grey Bentley driven by a portly, moustachioed man with a singularly archaic haircut.

"Of course, as your dear, doting uncle I am quite happy to help you through drama school," Uncle Monty was saying, his voice cracking at the edges, "but it is so very expensive …"

Sheridan, who at sixteen was already rather aware that nothing came for free in this world, sighed and said, "I can get you the holiday address of Young or Headley or Bircham-Potter," he said impatiently, "they're all a bunch of buggers – "

Uncle Monty winced. "Please don't talk like that."

That was the problem with his uncle, Sheridan reflected. He was of that generation who insisted upon romanticizing the gross sexual act and getting all sentimental over nothing. Uncle Monty remembered green and idyllic England, the great Empire. Sheridan had been born in the first year of a bloody and global war and grown up watching said empire fall apart as thoroughly as his Victoria sponge had. It was tricky to be anything but pragmatic in the face of post-war Britain.

"Perhaps we could …" Uncle Monty said cautiously, looking uncomfortable and lascivious all at once. Sheridan waited patiently for the fat old queen to get to the point. He was sure he wasn't going to like the point, but he thought he was going to like being stuck at home with a vengeful father and disappointed mother even less. "We could, ah … arrange a down payment … that sounds frightfully grubby …"

"Uncle," Sheridan groaned, rolling his eyes in search of fortitude from a god he'd ceased to believe in about the time he was first introduced to the brutal and barbaric practice of public school rugger, "what is it that you want me to do?"

Apparently Uncle Monty only needed a nudge in the right direction. He said in the kind of voice that honeyed crumpets might speak in, had they mouths and lips to speak with, "perhaps you could give me a, um, a demonstration. Of your skills."

"Hand or mouth?" Sheridan said briskly, his hand hovering over the tight wool of Uncle Monty's groin. It was not a pleasant prospect at all, but he was buggered if he was going to be … well. Exactly.

Uncle Monty started, apparently aback by this businesslike attitude, "I, er … whichever you prefer …"

Sheridan rolled his sleeve up above his elbow more for effect than out of concern for a uniform that he was never going to need again, and after a moment of scrabbling with the labyrinthine fastenings of his uncle's trousers, he spat into his palm.

"How _vulgar_," Uncle Monty said with a sort of horrified fascination. Sheridan shrugged his bony and awkward shrug, and caught his uncle's fat little penis in the saliva-swamped palm of his hand.

As he worked, his elbow jabbing his own side as Uncle Monty made little wheezy noises of appreciation, Sheridan looked everywhere but at what he was doing. Uncle Monty's face was beginning to sweat already, and only the cracked-open windows kept the car from steaming up as great puffs of hot breath came from him.

At sixteen, Sheridan had had plenty of experience in this department. He knew the quick-quick-slow squeeze, the right way to draw or half-draw the hood of foreskin back over the _glans_, when to relax his hold a little and when to speed up, to charge with swift flicks of the wrist towards a messy finish. He tried not to rush _too_ much, but he had no desire to draw it out, not with Uncle Monty's distressingly piglike sounds of enjoyment filling his ears.

He knew he'd almost finished his job when a heavy chubby hand grabbed his shoulder and gripped more tightly than such a limp cabbage of a man ought to be able to. Sheridan didn't even try to twist out of his grip, just increased the speed of his own hand, his elbow and shoulder beginning to ache.

He was rewarded summarily with a grunt, a gasp, and a mercifully small deposit of semen over the back of his hand. Sheridan wiped this on the side of the seat while Uncle Monty's eyes were still shut, and for a moment or two the interior of the Bentley was approximately silent but for Uncle Monty's diminishing hard breaths. Sheridan rolled his sleeve back down and buttoned the cuff again.

"Tuition," he ventured when Uncle Monty sounded less like a steam engine, "I mean, fees."

"Absolutely, dear boy, but it will have to wait a little while," Uncle Monty murmured, tucking himself back in.

"_What_?" Sheridan regarded him coldly.

"Oh, I fully intend to keep up my … my end of the bargain. You _are_ my favourite nephew, my dear," Uncle Monty said a little breathlessly as he started the engine. The look his "favourite nephew" gave him was filthy and homicidal. "Well, your parents … the manner of your expulsion … not to put too fine a point on it – " Uncle Monty gave Sheridan an entirely unappreciated look of deep sympathy. "They want you to visit a sanatorium for a rest."

"_What_?" Sheridan repeated in a strangled voice that rose an octave above the pitch it had settled on the previous year.

"It – it's just for a couple of months – " Uncle Monty said rather miserably. "They want to get you _straightened out_, you see – "

"I am _not mad_," Sheridan barked, his hair standing on end. He did not look particularly sane at that moment.

"I know, dear boy, but they must be allowed their indulgences … we all must, I suppose."

* * *

 

Sheridan Withnail fulfilled his parents' expectations and quite obligingly had a nervous breakdown, remaining under psychiatric supervision until he was 21, whereupon his Uncle Monty put a lot of time, energy and money into having him enrolled in the CSSD*. The story of _that_ is told in Dramatis.

*And not as previously asserted, RADA


End file.
